Spell check: Why online typos are cool, not cringe
Are you OK? Or are you okay, okie, okiii, okai or kk? If you text, you already know that each of those responses mean vastly different things. You know, without taking a Coursera lesson on the subject, how old someone is by the way they greet you: Hello, heyyy or hieeee.
But text-speak has been throwing up new complications. The way you misspell words online matters, too. Earlier this year, news went viral after user Libby Stigaard mentioned that her “phone just autocorrected trauma dumping to trauma dumpling”. She celebrated the error with a sketch of a potsticker, with dark circles and a moping expression. It was the pivot the internet didn’t know it needed. Who wouldn’t want a trauma dumpling, really? Hold the sauce.
Another in-the-know error: Using car when you mean cat. You can always tell who’s out of touch by the well-meaning corrections in the comments.
Quirky online typos existed before brain rot took over us all. In the mid-2000s, there was a whole genre of memes known as Lolcats. These featured pictures of felines in funny situations, with Sans Serif baby-talk captions. One had a puffy grey British Shorthair cat, asking if “I can haz cheezburger?”, another featured a crying ginger kitty who was “out of focuss”. Lolspeak, as it came to be known, is its own form of kitty pidgin, tech entrepreneur Anil Dash wrote in a blog in 2007. Deliberately misspelling words was a feature, not a bug, of keyboard communication. And it had “fairly consistent grammar”, Dash noted.
Our misspellings define us as much as our dictionaries now. Does “All your base are belong to us” make sense? Only if you grew up in the ’90s and played the Japanese game Zero Wing, which had that badly translated opening cutscene. Can you read through these words without cringing: Hooman, fren, smol, angwee, and birb? You were paying attention to Tumblr-speak in the 2010s. You believe “Why you no” is a perfectly clear way to start a query? You’ve spent time on 9gag.
Redditors use cryinf, woag, forgor, and ourple — there’s a pattern here. And Gen Z and Gen Alphas have their own lexicon of misspellings — thicc, lewk, stahp, buttah, tnx, ops, unc, ded, liek.
Gamers celebrate their misspellings. Pwned, a ’90s corruption of the word owned, is now a real word. It emerged because O and P are so close to each other on the keyboard. (It’s pronounced ‘poned’, according to Merriam-Webster). We also have gamers to thank for the banger “teh” (a consequence of typing “the” too fast), noob (newbie), and wat (what).
To the offline population, all of these terms are mildly perplexing errors. Correct spelling and pronunciation are markers of educational status and authority; the Queen’s English was associated with the upper classes in England in the 19th and 20th centuries. Today, misspellings are markers of being in-the-know, of belonging to a subset that sees the error and makes it anyway. “We draw lines between insiders who get our references and outsiders who don’t,” writes internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch in her 2019 book, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language. If you’re not “in” with the slang, you can’t text w/us.
Besides, they’re just as loaded with politics and subtext. If you call a cat “chonky”, it’s a cute floof; But “chunky” sounds low-key like you’re fat-shaming. It’s a truth universally acknowledged now that doggo refers to adorable canines and doggy refers to… something else. “Work well” sounds normal and boring. “Werk it” — a slang term that originated in LGBTQIA+ communities and drag culture — means doing something flawlessly and slaying at it. Periodt.
From HT Brunch, August 30, 2025
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